Being Star Trek/Star Wars geeks we naturally have developed a good Astometrics analogy for how STMA works.
The astronomy model is a star which has planets orbitting it.
A planet can have moons orbitting it.
A star is formed when a planetary body becomes so massive it collapse and ignites.
We use this model to describe an MA system. With ST Karate, after many years, it got so massive it "ignited" and became a system in its own right.
Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. Jupiter was almost massive enough to become a star in it's own right, although it did not. As it is, Jupiter has several moons about the same size as Earth, Venus and Mars, a little sub solar system. Had Jupiter ignited, these moons would now form a planetary system.
We can see binary star systems in our own galaxy - a smaller star orbitting a larger star. This is what potential could have happened in our system with Jupiter.
In STMA, our Jujutsu system did achieve critical mass and ignited becoming a star in it's own right, a seperate system.
ST Karate is our core star with ST JJ orbitting, forming a binary star system.
The other arts that make up STMA are planets that orbit our stars. The subsystems are the moons.
ST Kobudo is a planet orbitting ST Karate, a system made up of the weapons of karate. The moons are the individual weapons themselves.
If you wanted to specialise in Nunchaku Do, you would land on the nunchaku moon orbitting the kobudo planet. There you would spend time learning the kihon, kata and kumite of the nunchaku.
Kobudo and eskrima are a binary planet system, much like Pluto and Charon are now understood to be.
Eskrima's moons consist of largo, serrada, sinawalli, kadena, etc.
JJ, being a star, has Judo and Aikido as planets. Though I am only a 1st dan in Judo and never graded in aikido, what I teach is ST JJ, and the planets are my interpretation of what those arts manifest as.
ST kobudo may one day become a star.
We also have an analogy based on Quantum Mechanics - but that is far too complicated to post here!)
